I think this in one of the most important circle any organization needs to be aware of.

The customer experience circle:

If you don’t understand this circle then you would never be able to provide that level of customer experience which the customer is looking for. If you observe closely you may appreciate that the customer experience is at the hand of the touch points. Which are largely outsourced which I shared in one of my earlier post (The rise and fall of Roman empire due to outsourcing their most critical activity).

If a company really believes in customer experience, then they would understand that their strength of service lies in how well the touch points provide services. In other words the customer experience lies in how engaged the touch point or the front end team is in the system. Lets also keep one more point in mind that service is intangible which cannot be measured but felt. A lot of companies have been trying to quantify and provide similar experience through defined processes and defined action. But, a sentence said in the right frame can be said in a negative frame too. Which unfortunately cannot be quantified and identified unless the customer escalates to higher ups.

Have you tried to the escalation matrix in a call center?

How many times have you been able to get through?

Nightmare is it not?

So then where does the answer lie – It lies in the fact that more you have engaged employee the better would be the customer experience.

The other part sit as a call center executive for a day and you will understand how difficult is to handle customer morning to evening day after day.

So you as an organization need to have engagement activities in around having fun. Specially before the agent leaves home so that the negativity experienced during the day wears off.

So to summarize and in case you really mean business and believe in customer experience. Please ensure:

Your employee is highly engaged

There is a fun element specially for employee in continuous touch with the customer – Specially your service team

That team is highly empowered and has access to the top management. I see many company top management taking pride that they get escalations which they personally handle. My question if the front end team is empowered those failure would have not happened as the team would have brought those cases prior to customer poor service experience.

Please do look at it critically – One company that comes in mind is Southwest Airlines a veteran in customer experience.